Why 'Shin Godzilla' Is Vastly Superior To 'Godzilla: King Of The Monsters'

Godzilla: King of the Monstersfell flat at the box office. One could argue that, outside of longtime Godzilla fans, audiences don’t really care to see King Ghidorah and Mothra rendered in glossy CGI, but I think that’s an oversimplification.

Ant-Man and Captain Marvel did great, and it’s not because they’re massively popular; it’s because Marvel managed to reinvent them for the big screen, to make them resonate with people who have never picked up a comic book.

King of the Monsters fell flat, because it is flat. While fans who have loved watching kaiju fights since childhood claim that all they wanted was cool fight scenes, that’s not enough for everyone else. Godzilla and his frenemies don’t just have to look cool - they have to mean something.

The best modern-day Godzilla film ever made, by a wide margin, is Shin Godzilla. The 2016 Japanese film is sandwiched between Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and puts both to shame.

Monsters that capture the public imagination aren’t empty vessels; they are manifestations of our worst nightmares, and Shin Godzilla returns the creature to his roots, as a powerful metaphor, the gargantuan lizard originally embodying the fear of nuclear annihilation.

While Hollywood’s Godzilla is a fat, friendly beast who appears to represent the most benevolent aspect of Mother Nature, Shin Godzilla seems to have spawned from a fever dream, forged from the terrible memories of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Shin Godzilla represents not just the fear of nuclear contamination, but the apocalyptic element of nature, the unintended side-effect of humanity’s polluting, industrializing, climate-changing ways. The film’s titular creature has no discernible personality; it is an animal, blundering through the city, confused, responding aggressively to the inevitable militaristic response.

While the film suffers from the same issue that plagues nearly all kaiju films - uninteresting human characters - it doesn’t really matter, because the human scenes are satirical, depicting a government slow to respond to a disaster, too bureaucratic to effectively deal with the chaos of Godzilla.

While King of the Monsters has a half-hearted environmentalist theme (which is heavily undercut by its own story), Shin Godzilla depicts not just a terrifying creature emerging from the deep, but imagines the response of the government to be terrifyingly ineffective. The appeal of Godzilla is not limited to the spectacle of the great lizard, but humanity’s relationship to him; where did he come from, and how does our society respond?

King of the Monsters is utterly uninterested in that question, the conflict boils down to an alien invader battling the Titans of Earth, i.e. "us" vs. "them." Said Titans have no metaphorical undertone, just a vague environmental connection that is never really explored. They fail as monsters, being devoid of symbolism, existing only to rise up, bash each other about a bit, and then leave.

Without some kind of connection to modern-day anxieties (of which there are several to choose from), how can audiences relate to a kaiju punch-up? As much as I love the sight of monsters fighting and biting each other to pieces, non-human creatures need to be imbued with something more than cool character design.

Speaking of character design, Shin Godzilla’s hellish appearance firmly distinguishes it from its cuddly American counterpart; the beast emerges from the ocean in an amphibious form, with bulging eyes, unable to stand. It looks genuinely silly, but the irradiated mutant is able to evolve to suit its surroundings, and quickly grows to resemble the Godzilla we know and love, but utterly devoid of anthropomorphism.

Shin Godzilla behaves like a lizard, lacking mammalian facial expressions and body language, reacting seemingly with fear to the violence it encounters (though it’s difficult to gauge what exactly it feels). It’s a sentient hurricane, spewing atomic beams from every crevice, really invoking the A-bomb metaphor that first spawned the creature.

Shin Godzilla understands that the titular creature is far more than a nostalgia-milker; he’s extremely relevant to modern audiences, reflecting the natural and unnatural disasters the world currently faces. King of the Monsters, on the other hand, tries to tell a feel-good environmental apocalypse story, and fails miserably.

Godzilla vs. Kong is the final chance for this franchise to resonate; it’d be a genuine shame to see Hollywood’s kaiju go extinct, unable to adapt to, or reflect, changing times.